The emaciated elders shuffled in from their duties and each took a post on either side of the bed. “These are the angels of my nature,” Uncle Kosokian said, forestalling Conrad’s question. “One better than the other. They are also my bodyguards.”
“Where did you get these two? A fire sale?” Conrad eyed them with a contemptuous smile to disguise his unease. He disliked their beady eyes and toothless grins, how they hunched like vultures and picked at their scabrous flesh, all the while listening with feigned disinterest. Neither amounted to much more than a bundle of twigs and rawhide, yet some quality of presence, a violent magnetism, radiated from them; a similar dark aura emanated from Uncle Kosokian and seemed to intensify with age and infirmity rather than diminish. Conrad would’ve been tempted to characterize the force as evil if he subscribed to such concepts.
“Be kind,” Uncle Kosokian said, his accent miraculously thinning. “You’ll inherit their services, if you’re lucky. Meanwhile, a final request.”
“No,” Conrad said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“No, I won’t stop looking for Genie.”
“Lad, I admire your pluck. Your nemesis, this Drake, he is powerful. Powerful and terrible. I beg you, desist before he takes notice and squashes you.”
“I would hate for that to happen. I will try to be clever.”
“You are cunning as a beast is cunning,” Uncle Kosokian said. “That’s not enough. Did your father ever explain why he split you and fair Imogene when you were children? Why he sent you to me?”
“Dad was vague on that point.”
“The fellow wasn’t fond of sharing his thoughts. Too many dark secrets. Too many enemies from his service with your government. Imogene was to be his weapon against them. That’s why he made certain she was groomed for law enforcement. She served him well. You, he wished to protect from his foes. Believe it or not, he loved you best, Conrad. That is why he sent you to me, why you were cloistered here in my demesne.” Kosokian sucked a tall glass of Tiger’s Milk and breathed heavily. “Your father had other plans for you. Alas, his breakdown and untimely demise derailed everything he’d worked to accomplish. He would not approve of your Quixotic pursuit of Imogene. She became embroiled in his vendetta with the forces of darkness, as it were. No sense following her into oblivion.”
Conrad said, “You talk a lot for a guy on oxygen.”
Kosokian’s immediate family and friends began arriving at sundown. These were a motley collection of down-at-the-heels aristocrats, dilettantes, and an ever-circling swarm of lamprey and pilot fish. Conrad remembered a handful of them from his youth, and he shook hands and kissed cheeks as the guests ascended the steps and passed through the front door in a cavalcade of morbid pageantry. Kosokian’s servants had shut off the electricity and lighted dozens of torches and lamps, hundreds of fat, gothic candles in chandeliers and candelabras. Smokey shadows hung thick in the narrow passages and the vaulted banquet hall alike. The walls were decorated with soot-stained tapestries, curtains, and a grand collection of archaic weaponry and armor.
The whole roasted boar arrived on a five-foot-long trencher, apple in mouth. From his position as guest of honor near the head of the main table, Conrad eyed the assembly in their cloaks and capes, their tall hats and taller hairdos, and thought this could be a banquet in the castle of a degenerate prince circa the latter middle ages. He could almost taste the metal of the long knives—those in their hands and the ones up their sleeves. The hall was indeed dim, but he sensed a deeper and more sinister darkness in the furtive glances, the sly, cold smiles. Upon Kosokian’s demise his kith and kin would divide his estate as they ferociously divided the boar.
Attendant’s wheeled the great man into the hall aboard a mahogany chair oversized as a throne and carved in the likeness of a dragon. Kosokian had dispensed with the oxygen mask and donned resplendent silk robes of crimson trimmed in gold, and jeweled rings on every finger. He laid an obsidian rod across his knees. A golden pendant set with an obscenely large ruby reinforced his image as the moribund potentate, a sorcerer-king who’d stepped from tarot card to hold a final debauched court.
Servants in crimson livery arrived with platters and decanters while a sextet of troubadours decked in medieval garb mounted a dais and started in with their flutes, harps, and recorders. Incense bubbled and spat within strategically placed braziers, cloying odors of lotus and dragons’-blood overwhelming the rot of Kosokian’s bandages, the reek of his decayed flesh.
Conrad escaped as soon as humanly possible, seizing his opportunity when plates were finally cleared and the assembly broke down into pairs for dancing. He sneaked to the balcony and stood in the shadows, smoking a cigarette and watching moonlight glint from the waves.
His escape was short-lived—several guests emerged from the hall, led by a servant who lighted a torch in a sconce and revealed Conrad’s hiding place. A curvaceous blonde in a bright green summer dress introduced herself. She was a cousin of their host, several places removed. Her father hailed from York and served the British consulate. Her mother worked for the queen as a dining consultant. Her brother flew warplanes in the Royal Air Force. So far as Conrad could determine after listening for ten minutes, the girl herself did nothing except drink and spend her parents’ money. Her cheeks were rosy from heat and booze.
“So, why are you lurking?” she said. Her diamond earrings blazed in the torchlight. “Aren’t you the guest of honor?”
“I was looking for the cask of Amontillado,” he said. His shirt stuck to the small of his back.
She laughed. Perspiration beaded in the hollow of her throat, gleamed across the swell of her breasts. “For the love of God, Montresor,” she said, and moved her hip so that it locked with his.
“Yes, for the love of God.”
He went with her to the garden and lifted her dress and pressed her against a shattered colonnade and they coupled in the dull red light that spilled from the terrace. The stars flickered with the beat of his rising blood and began to turn.
She nipped his ear and said, “I don’t like that mean old uncle of yours. He’s a fraud. Not as sick as he lets on, for damn sure.”
Conrad looked into her eyes, but that didn’t help. He gripped her haunches and worked harder.
She said, “We were here for Christmas. After everyone went to bed, the old man rolled out on the balcony in his creepy throne-mobile. I was down here in the bushes smoking a joint. He stepped off the balcony and zipped into the darkness like one of those wire-fu action heroes. I didn’t see where he went. Heard him cackling, though.”
He pondered a response. There were so many questions. His next thrust did the trick and she screamed and wrapped herself around him like a boa constrictor and he forgot what he’d intended to ask.
Uncle Kosokian passed away later that evening. Three days later his body, wrapped head to toe in a silk shroud, was placed on a pyre at sunset and burned. He did not leave Conrad a penny.
III
When Conrad arrived in the States he bought a Cadillac, a 1948 Sixty Special Fleetwood, at a used car lot in Santa Fe. The salesman claimed it was originally the property of a small-time cartel boss who got himself whacked by a jealous mistress. There were bullet holes, somewhere. Conrad wondered how many cars rolling around once belonged to dead people. We drive their cars, sleep in their beds, wear their clothes. Wear their faces.
He called a friendly private investigator named Tony Kite and doubled down on the finder’s fee for the Brazilian. Finder’s and catcher’s fee. Tony promised to assign more guys, he was closing in, etc., etc. Conrad wished he could’ve consolidated his efforts, put the Two Stooges, Marsh and Singh, on the case, but the Stooges weren’t his friends. They answered to higher powers. If they realized he wanted to talk with a wanted criminal such as Souza, their evil faces would light up like kids at Christmas. Then there’d be hell to pay, and more. That the nation’s number one intelligence agency hadn’t put two and two together was both alarm
ing and amusing.
Money was a problem. Money was always a problem no matter how many bones he crushed or how much blood he let or dues he paid. The fucking rent was always due.
One night he was waiting out the small hours in a saloon in the badlands by nursing a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black when a rowdy group piled in from the desert darkness and started tearing up the joint. He’d situated in a dark corner facing the door, a woman tight against his hip. Him and the girl had been on the road for forty-eight hours since he found her at a booth in a diner looking shrewdly forlorn. A peroxide blonde with tepid eyes and a livid keloid on her neck in the shape of a stylized jellyfish that elongated and distorted as she breathed.
The mark electrified the hairs on his body, ignited the primitive fuse at his core, cranked the rotor in his brain, churned primordial muck. But he didn’t protest, didn’t turn on his heel and fly. Flight hadn’t worked before, anyway. They, whoever they were, the Honorable Opposition, as he thought of them, had had their hooks deep in him for a year now, a year that he’d noticed, just before the expedition to South America. His hunch was all the work with the transcendental meditation and autohypnosis, the hours of gawping at psychedelic films and weird Rorschach blot patterns Imogene cadged from god knew where, had gotten the gears turning, had really and truly cracked the door. Maybe he was entering an altered state as Dad prophesied, as that devilish eminence Dr. Drake had allegedly attained. Conrad might be on his way to achieving godhead and wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass?
Or, more likely, exhaustion and brain damage were doing the talking.
Her name was Yolanda, or Wanda, he couldn’t remember, and she was too drunk to see straight. She rested her head on the table between the ashtray and a handful of quarters. A cigarette smoldered in the corner of her mouth. He pulled it free, frowned at the lipstick ring, and smoked the remainder while the newcomers chuckled and hooted like hyenas and glass shattered.
The group was eclectic: three men in polo shirts and golf slacks, their big-haired girls in sequined cocktail dresses; a squad of hurly-burly bikers in full-on leather regalia, bodyguards of the Rodeo Drive refugees; and a tall, rangy man in faded Army fatigues. His hair was black and sleek, his eyes pale as ice water. His nose was flat. He wore a spiked collar, spiked bracelets, and a fistful of shiny, expensive rings. His boots were the steel toe kind. A nasty bruise on his sculpted cheekbone was fading to yellow.
They’d grabbed a bunch of tables and commenced drinking. The girls played pool with a couple of the drunker, braver locals. The bikers slammed tequila and took turns hurling shot glasses at the mirror above the bar and the bartender himself, who eventually retreated to the kitchen and hid. The pretty boys in the polo shirts guffawed and sipped beer.
The tall, black-haired man stared at Conrad. Conrad stared back, highlighting him with a golden shaft of light from nowhere. I can do that AND bend spoons with my mind power. Holy shit. He blinked and the shaft of light, which no else seemed to notice, winked out. The black-haired guy was Rauno-something or other. Members of the Pageant knew him as the Finn, an unranked fighter on the periphery and rising fast. Young and mean. If he lived a few more years he might land a patron, might become somebody. Conrad thought the guy didn’t have a few more years.
The Finn unfolded from his chair and strolled over to where the party girls were flirting with the hapless locals. The local boys were stout, blue collar types, probably construction workers; corduroy jackets, greasy ball-caps on backward, half-blitzed and irritable as bulls. Neither was too happy when the Finn told them in an exaggerated accent to get their filthy Yankee paws off his women. There was a long moment where nothing happened, then one of the men smashed the Finn’s jaw with a bottle and his partner broke a pool cue across the Finn’s spine. The Finn shrugged and laughed and wiped a trickle of blood from his lip. He turned and stuck his thumb in the eye of the guy who’d hit him with the pool cue. The other man threw a haymaker punch, but the Finn absorbed it and caught his arm and twisted it until it crunched. He ground the jagged base of the bottle into the man’s nose. Blood rushed over his knuckles. Then he leaned over and caught the man who was shrieking and crawling away by the testicles and the scruff of the neck, hoisted him shoulder-high and pitched him through the big picture window in a shower of neon. The bikers cheered and the polo shirt boys gave the Finn a round of golf claps.
The Finn wasn’t breathing hard. He looked at Conrad, hand on hip.
“Sit down before you fall down,” Conrad said. He poured another glass of booze and drank it all in one steady pull.
The bikers stirred, but the Finn waved and they settled. “Are you afraid of me?” His accent was completely invisible now.
“He’s a tub of shit. Smash him, Ronnie,” one of the girls said. She popped her gum.
Conrad frowned and poured again and drank again. His short hair was combed. He wore a casual navy blue suit, nice shoes, everything.
“Be quiet,” the Finn said to the girl and she shut up.
“He’s afraid okay,” one of the polo shirt boys said. “Lookit him. Jill’s right. Chubs is a round mound of ground. Givin’ you the hairy eyeball. Kick his ass, man. Fuck, lemme.” And everybody but the Finn laughed.
“I apologize for the idiots,” the Finn said. “I know who you are. Fight me.”
“I don’t want to fight you,” Conrad said. But he did want to, very, very much. The more he watched the Finn’s entourage, the more he yearned to taste blood. “I don’t do unsanctioned matches. My people aren’t comfortable with it.”
“Please do not be disrespectful.”
“You’re disrespectful and you’re unranked. Don’t bow up to me, son. It’s unseemly. Look at my scars.”
“I apologize. We would have a good match. You’ve seen my films. You know I can fight.”
“Pick on some other guy, some other night. Sit down, have a drink.”
“Name the terms.”
“Go away, son.”
The Finn gestured at one of the polo shirt boys and they held a whispered conference. The Finn said to Conrad, “Tomorrow night. There’s a place not far from here. You call your support people, whatever. I’m bringing my own staff and a film crew. So, full panoply.”
“Full panoply.” Conrad favored the simplicity of shoes and a t-shirt for something off the cuff like this, but the Finn obviously needed film, and film stock sold far better to the collectors if the contestants dressed in their peacock finest. “Seventy-five, winner take all.”
The Finn didn’t blink. “Done. Weapons? Hands and feet?”
“What do you prefer?”
The Finn smiled and made a fist.
IV
He found the town in a dried up basin valley, dropped his film at a one-hour-photo-mat. The pictures were sequences of him and Wanda in various poses against the landscape and others of just the empty land itself shot from the moving car. Photography didn’t particularly interest him. He snapped the photos because on occasion he’d spotted ghostly figures and orbs floating in the background of the developed film; hints of the unseen forces that surrounded him.
Wanda skipped off to have nails done at a salon. Conrad checked his battered and mutilated roadmap. His vision doubled; he wiped tears away with his sleeve. The sky contracted rhythmically, an origami nautilus.
The town was gritty, the kind of town one might expect from a macho man cigarette advertisement. High country, wind-blasted and strange in the provincial sense that such places have ever been strange to outsiders. Every structure creaked, every skinned surface ate the anemic light or gave it back too harshly.
Conrad squinted, clutched his head to keep it from cracking like a plate. His fingers were going numb, and that was odd; such a thing had never happened before unless he was blind drunk or succumbing to the sweet balm of unconsciousness from repeated blows to the head. The sensation came and went, tiny surges of disquiet.
He dialed Marsh from a payphone in the arcade between a tattoo parlor and a gun s
hop. It was a lengthy number printed inside a matchbook from the Egyptian Casino in Atlantic City. Conrad had no need to dig up the matchbook. His memory wasn’t perfect, not like Dad’s, or Imogene’s, or even Ezra’s had been; even so, he possessed a mnemonic knack with patterns and sequences. Number strings were cake. No, he used the green and gold matchbook because he enjoyed the gilt lettering, its cured scent, the suggestion of great mysteries unfolding in the dark.
The line hummed.
A pit bull wandered the street, snuffling garbage. People gave it a berth without seeming to notice the object of their apprehension.
The line stuttered and snapped like a fire.
A kid in a biker jacket a couple of sizes too large stopped at Conrad’s car, peered into the dirty windows.
“Hah,” Marsh said, far away. Chamber music droned, water rushed over rocks. Woodwinds, violins, recorders, river stones rubbed smooth as glass. No opera today. Marsh had once confided that he preferred opera when his mood was savage.
“Marsh,” Conrad said.
“What… Goddamn it.” Marsh disconnected.
Conrad waited.
The kid in the biker jacket whistled to the pit bull. They walked across the deserted lot, went through a break in the cyclone fencing, soon became specks in the outlying fields. The white gulf was penetrated by water towers, train tracks, abandoned box cars, a million miles of scrub. Someday alien probes might descend, drill core samples and speculate whether life could’ve possibly existed here in aeons gone by.
The payphone rang. Marsh said, “It’s okay now. How’d you get that number? That’s my private number.” The chamber music was gone.
The Light is the Darkness Page 4